Happy New Year All. Hope everyone had a fun and safe celebration. Based on responses from last week’s post I will be revisiting a few training development topics from 2019 during 2020, and I got a few suggestions that we didn’t touch on last year as well.

To not start off with a rerun, I will begin the New Year with a different topic, and 3 related questions.

Many training departments are responsible for employee development training that is outside the scope of “regular job duties”. Often these are titled self-development courses or something similar. They can range widely in topic from the always applicable “Active Listening” to something as obscure as “How Taking Good Care of Your Pet Reflects on Your Job Satisfaction.”

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I can make arguments for and against these kinds of trainings, but I thought I would put it to you.

Do you think businesses should provide this kind of personal development training?

Do you think the success of these trainings can be measured (if so how)?

What are the biggest challenges to effectively providing these development trainings?

I'm curious about this, as well-- I've held "Personal Accountability" classes, "Stress Management' classes, and "Emotional Intelligence" workshops, all of which have been received positively by participants but were difficult to connect directly to bottom-line results impacts. Offering opportunities for personal development helps an organization demonstrate to their employees that they are valued as individuals (not just as "worker bees" who complete specific tasks). Measure employee engagement?

Keith Pomeroy

January 08, 2020 03:19 PM

Jennifer, the one example I often come back to is a training program that was developed by someone else at a previous workplace on Management Techniques and Employee Development that I was told could not be measured except by the participant's reaction, and I always thought that looking at their retention and their direct employee's retention against the average would have been a more productive way of measuring it.

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Karen Welveart

January 03, 2020 10:53 AM

I've held "Active Listening" training before and got a fantastic response from attendees saying they didn't realize how much they are planning their responses rather than actually listening to others. I even had some follow-up saying they use their new awareness both professionally and personally... they were amazed by the difference. I'm curious to see if others see them as development opportunities and how.

Keith Pomeroy

January 06, 2020 08:40 AM

Karen, was anything done to track them and see how the training impacted the business?

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